Haja Zainab Hawa Bangura is a Sierra Leonean politician and social activist who has been serving as the Director-General of the United Nations Office at Nairobi since 2018, appointed by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
15 Facts About Zainab Bangura
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In 2007, Bangura became Sierra Leone's foreign minister in the government of President Ernest Bai Koroma of the All People's Congress Party.
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Zainab Bangura was the second woman to serve in that post, following Shirley Gbujama who held that position from 1996 to 1997.
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Zainab Bangura served as Minister of Health and Sanitation from 2010 to 2012.
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The daughter of an imam, Zainab Hawa Bangura was born "Zainab Hawa Sesay" in the small rural town of Yonibana, Tonkolili District in the Northern Province of British Sierra Leone.
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Zainab Bangura was born into a family of limited means, and she attended secondary school on a scholarship that was awarded to her by the Mathora Girls Secondary School near Magburaka.
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Zainab Bangura later attended the Annie Walsh Girls Secondary School in the capital city of Freetown.
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Zainab Bangura became a social activist during the difficult period when Sierra Leone was ruled by the NPRC military junta.
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Zainab Bangura began with consciousness-raising efforts among urban market women, reminding her followers that her own mother was a market woman.
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In June 1997, as fighting engulfed the country, Zainab Bangura fled on a fishing boat to neighboring Guinea.
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Zainab Bangura won less than one percent of the vote, and her Movement for Progress party failed to gain any seats in Sierra Leone's parliament.
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Zainab Bangura claimed that her party's low vote count resulted from corruption in the voting system.
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Zainab Bangura returned to Sierra Leone in 2007 after Ernest Bai Koroma won the presidency in a hard-fought national election and was named foreign minister shortly thereafter.
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In 2012, Zainab Bangura served on the United Nations Commission on Life-Saving Commodities, which was jointly chaired by Goodluck Jonathan and Jens Stoltenberg, and issued recommendations to increase access to and use of 13 essential commodities for women's and children's health.
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In November 2013, Zainab Bangura received an award from Project 1808 Inc, an organisation in partnership with University of Wisconsin Madison African Studies, Division of International Studies.